disappointed. A certain Hubert Rüsch, we are told, openly reviled the prophet, who replied by shooting him. This so terrified the people that they yielded a prompt obedience and their goods were deposited in the Town Hall. Once again there was no distribution, for the city was closely invested by the bishop and his forces, and the revenues thus acquired were used for bribing the enemy guards and for sending envoys to the neighbouring cities to organize a relieving force.

Under Matthys' successor, John of Leyden, the danger inherent in revolutionary Anabaptism became daily more apparent. Kautsky, while admitting that John was misguided, represents him none the less as the champion of the workers against their natural oppressors. But a closer examination leaves us rather with the unpleasant impression of a man who, though no doubt originally moved by some sort of religious experience, had degenerated into a pure adventurer. Of his courage and ability there can, however, be no question. The chroniclers, Dorpius, Gresbeck and Kerssenbroch, for all their hostility, pay a grudging tribute to his inexhaustible energy and resourcefulness. He organized the defence of the city; he provided for the distribution of food; he maintained the spirits of the people by entertainments of his own devising; and, for fifteen months, he held Münster against all the forces which the Reich could put into the field. In every way John played upon the Anabaptist principle of brotherhood. The communist régime initiated by Matthys was developed. Rothmann, now public orator, proclaimed that "a Christian should have no money-neither silver nor gold. All that Christian brothers or sisters possess belongs as much to the one as to the other. The brothers shall own nothing but their food and clothes, house and home. Everything shall be common. It is mine as well as thine, and thine as well

as mine."

Certain of John's regulations were possibly inspired by the exigencies of the siege. At the same time he sought to extend communism of consumption to communism of production. Garments were standardized. The number of articles of clothing which individuals were permitted to possess was prescribed. Deacons made an inventory of all possessions, and confiscated those which they judged to be superfluous. But this was only a beginning. The Anabaptist movement in Münster had

originally marked the victory of the guilds over the ecclesiastical authorities. But the authority of the guilds was now overthrown. The production of the city was organized upon communist lines. All work for payment was forbidden. Supervisors were appointed to regulate the various trades. An elaborate food control was instituted. Communal breweries and bakeries were set up. Common eating-houses were established at the city gates, each under the charge of a deacon, who drew the necessary provisions.

It is a remarkable testimony to the hold which John exercised over the people that he was able to enforce these stringent regulations with which he himself made no effort to comply. His Hofordnung, of 1534, appoints to his court craftsmen and artificers of every description. Having proclaimed himself as by divine revelation King of the New Jerusalem he surrounded himself with every luxurious appointment. He dressed in the finest silks; he adorned himself with jewels; he never appeared without gorgeous retinue. In spite of his edict prohibiting the use of money he struck coins bearing his image and superscription. | Yet Rothmann was able in his Restitution to announce that as absolute a communism existed in Münster as in the early Church. "Not only are all goods held in common and are administered by deacons, but private property of every sort has been abolished. There is no buying and selling, no rent or interest. And this we will maintain with our lives, for such a community of goods is alone acceptable to God and no man can please Him who does not practise it or whose heart is not inclined thereto."

But in one respect at least John could boast that he had bettered the instruction of the Apostles. On the death of Matthys he declared that it had been revealed to him in a vision that the Saints, in emulation of the Patriarchs, should marry as many wives as they could support. He himself showed the way by taking to himself no less than seventeen wives. Kautsky argues that this measure was rendered necessary because of the numbers of men who had fled from the city, leaving their women destitute. The new régime was thus introduced to regulate and control those promiscuous relations which the abnormal situation encouraged. But there is not the least suggestion in any of the Anabaptist writings to justify this assertion. The truth is that the people were in a state of religious exaltation which made it comparatively easy for an unscrupulous leader to do what he liked

1

with them. Here again John relied upon the oratory of Rothmann, who seems himself to have been converted by the scriptural precedents for polygamy, by the consideration that monogamy was nowhere expressly enjoined in the New Testament, and by the prophecy that the Saints should be faithful and multiply and inherit the earth. The sexual communism of polygamy was indeed not inconsistent with the revolutionary antinomian doctrines of the extreme Anabaptists, and Bullinger had early noted the very strange opinions held by one division of the sect, the Wild Brothers. At the same time polygamy was an altogether abnormal development, for the sanctity of marriage had been insisted upon in the strongest terms by all the early Anabaptists.

What, in conclusion, underlay these communist experiments ? Certainly they were not, as Kautsky represents them, primarily economic. Social discontent there undoubtedly was. We are aware of a dawning sense of class-consciousness among the poorer classes. None the less it was from the religious revivalism of the time that these movements were generated. The Reformation was not simply the rejection of certain theological doctrines of sin and redemption. It was a revolt against the whole tradition and authority of Rome. But it is not possible to touch an established Church without at the same time weakening the social organization in which it has grown up. The rejection of the Catholic faith gave an immense impetus to separatism with its peculiar social doctrines, and this made its strongest appeal to men of high ethical principles who were disgusted at the opposition which they everywhere saw between institutional religion and the Sermon on the Mount. For them the true reformation lay, not in the substitution of the authority of the reformers for that of the Pope, but in a return to the uncorrupted simplicity of the early Church, when all men were of one mind and had all things in common. But while the early Anabaptists taught that this was only to be effected by spiritual weapons, there were others whose fanaticism led them to interpret the scriptures in a revolutionary sense, and to conclude that it was their duty to exterminate those whom they were unable to convert. The form which Anabaptist communism assumed simply depended upon whether the movement was controlled by the moderate or by the extremist element.

It only remains to add that though modern communism has

provided us with spectacles before which the horrors of the siege of Münster pale into insignificance, it rests upon principles which are totally different from those of the religious communism of the sixteenth century. Hoffmann and Marx agree in nothing save in their revolutionary and apocalyptic tendencies. The communism of Marx rests upon a philosophical, not upon a religious basis. And although his ideas are often thrown upon the background of natural law, the Hegelian dialectic in his hands is used to justify an interpretation of history which is altogether rationalistic, and an economic determinism which regards the material conditions of life, and in particular the system of production obtaining at any given time, as responsible for the religion, laws and institutions of society. Thus, Marx concludes, it is from the vices inherent in capitalism that the communist worldrevolution is generated by an ineluctable necessity.

R. N. CAREW HUNT

THE

A FORGED TREASURE IN SERBIA

HE Glozel "affair" has recalled to me in some of its features an imposition of a more serious kind and of a very different nature that took place many years since in the heart of the Balkans, and of which I was myself, in part, a victim. Nothing but a very incomplete record of this for a while successful imposture has, so far as I am aware, been published; indeed, owing to an extraordinary chain of circumstances the key to its origins and the story of the final dénouement could only be supplied by myself. It is a story of buried treasure. But it has at least a

foundation in fact.

It is well known that great national disasters, such as the over-running of a comparatively civilized country by barbarous foes, have led to the burying of countless hoards that it was hoped perhaps to recover in happier times. Such epochs of ruthless invasion in ancient Britain are marked by the antiquarian records of numerous contemporary hoards of coins or other precious objects, thus concealed from plunderers. The successful incursions into the remotest districts of the island in the latter part of the fourth century of our era, by Picts and Scots on the one side and Saxons on the other, led to the deposit of a whole series of hoards of gold and silver coins of the later emperors. That the Turkish conquest of the Balkan countries should have produced similar results was only to have been expected, and the discovery of a large silver hoard on Kosovo-itself the scene of the crowning national disaster-is mentioned below.

In the case of some of those who fled the country at the time of the Turkish conquest, or on the occasion of the great migration at a later date under the Patriarch Arsenius Tchernojevich, family documents relating to buried treasures left behind seem to have been actually preserved. A curious chance indeed enables me to refer to an important instance of such a document having been in the possession of the descendant of one who played an historic part in that last united stand of the Serbian peoples against the Ottoman invaders.

The death struggle on the field of Kosovo, on St. Vitus' day, June 15, 1389, has since supplied the theme of the greatest